It's just one of those remorseless milestones on Ruin's highway, as you come upon them the heart sinks a little further, the knees buckle a fraction more, the shoulders stoop themselves; it's just another example of the moronic gobsters shitting all over everything, including our precious language, and of their turds of wisdom fertilising the ghastly managerialist patois which befouls the public - and probably the private - discourse. Clearly, on balance, in a sense, in a very real sense, I simply say, a myriad of, at the end of the day, the bottom line, end of; of course the Devil, as ever, is in the detail; hindsight is a wonderful thing, you simply cannot underestimate the importance of this; a gobbledegook of clumsy, infelicitous phrases strung together like sausages in a facetious, clodhopping attempt to convey eloquence, erudition, even; the purveyors of this claptrap were probably never aware that hopefully is an adverb, or even of what an adverb is.
It wouldn't be so bad if it was just Celebrity, gobbing away like this but it's Power, too, and Academe, lazy and stupid, they may as well be blowing bubbles. One hears and reads govament ministers, jumped-up seckatries of this-and-that who wouldn't - at their current age - pass the eleven-plus, so grossly malformed, imprecise, ambiguous and downright ugly is their spoken and written English. The BBC - or Radio CIA as it has recently reinvented itself; these Oxbridge Atlanticists, what are they like, eh? - its cabal of job-for-life idiot presenters wallowing in Estuary solecisms, no longer quietly guards the language, is no longer an exemplar, while Mark Beardy and Alan Yentob are paid millions, the arseholes. Editorials in the broadsheets are littered with sentences which aren't and the numbskulls who leave university with degrees can neither read, write, speak nor add-up.
Seems a little perverse, then, to object to one more idiocy, one more tautologism, why bother, who gives a fuck, not the UPM, fluent in shitespeak, not the foreign seckatry, a man whose clunking cadences jerk up and down like a fiddler's elbow, a man who thinks he dignifies his creaking rhetoric by making all of his ays long ones, yet a man who is lauded by his fellow parliamentarians as ay most scholarly fellow, even though he is ay noisesome poltroon. Wasn't BlindBoy Blunkett Education seckatry, isn't Alan Sugar in the House of Lords, isn't Adrian Choylds the new Voice of the Nation, or is it Chris Moyles or, God help us all, Chris the gobby nonce Evans?
Object we must, though, if only to comfort ourselves momentarily, to help steel ourselves, quicken our own step, against Ruin's backward quick-march. I know you, and you know me.....we come together rarely in peace and love but in sonnets of disquiet, commentaries of outrage - you know, Who the fuck do they think they're talking to, this garland of nincompoops, slung unwontedly around our necks, these people who bleat about falling standards, heedless that they, all over the media like the pox, are instigators, culprits not victims.
It is not for media consumption but for myself and my friends my stories are sung, nothing here is going to change the world nor be deemed Art and some here will recall my young friend, stanislav, railing against the apostrophe Jihadists, those, still around, still nit-picking, cheese-paring, hair splitting like spiv Tory lawyers, who would by dint of their lifelessness, their faux-grammarianism ,halt or dismember, make joyless this people's forum, and who would, bucket of cold watering, claim to have dismissed a post or an individual comment simply by having gleefully complained that an apostrophe was in the wrong place or absent, even though their own, mean rebuttals were often a linguistic and intellectual desert. Pray, let us not be so infantile, was the burden of stanislav's song. It is not vernacular prose rough-hewn or inadvertence or educationally short-changed ignorance to which he objected but to the well-educated turned language-fashionista, to those privileged by grammar or private schooling who are so contemptible; lazy, stupid and self satisfied, not for them the internalised self-editor whose rigour so polices many of us here, they don't have to think about what they are saying, these mediapolitico pricks, or how they say it, they are just cheap shits, in love with the sound of their own rank, turgid voices, bleating in chorus, singing, as they never fail to say, from the same hymnsheet, on a level playing field, not moving the goalposts.
In the 'forties, effete, public schoolboy layabout, George Orwell, wrote a furiously grand, snobby essay on the subject of politics and the English language and I will reproduce it here, eventually, it is uncannily prescient - you can hear the 'forties counterparts of the likes of Blair and Straw and Hague and Cameron burbling away meaninglessly, arrogant, conceited and empty-headed, soundbiting in cheesy concert - and reveals that this coarsening, this watering-down of language's precision and invention has been on the march for some time; who among us, here, would try to outguess its pitiless, vulgar legions? Well, now that the media nation, MediaMinster, is transformed into no more than a downmarket talking shop, I would. Statesmen, speechwriters, orators, my arse.
It was the reason why, which so recently bugged me ; you know how these things happen, you notice something once and then it's everywhere, these tautolgisms are all around, in the air and on the ground. The reason why Prince Gormless is marrying Miss Totty; the reason why Osama bin Wotsit was killed; the reason why the Coalition has come together not in the interests of its members - fuck no - but in the national interest; the reason why AyVee is shit and the reason why it is cool to kill Gadaffi's grandchildren, collateralise the wee nignogs, as Air Vice Marshall Rupert Golightly-Jockstrap would regretfully bluster it away, the cunt. The reason why these children were killed by us is because unfortunately these things happen in war, even though we are not at war.
And I nearly found myself advancing, here, the reasonwhy there has been a dearth of commentary in these quarters - the wee policeman, though, an eternal sentinel, some chiding hybrid of Miss Boulter and Mr Hill, threw me down my internal stairs, bless him.
The reason is that, after a fashion, we dried up; we lonesome, insomniacal obsessives shouldn't take holidays, for if we do they throw us off our stride, completely. It didn't help that the ten days were spent without passport to cyberspace, its instantaneousness of everything. I have been driving around the UK for a longtime, now, been up and down her highways as far as my eye could see and I have always been able to finish up exactly where I wanted to be, you look at a map, you just watch the signs, there's millions of them, or you can always pull-over and ask someone - you might find someone who can visualise things and give you concise, useful direction - but if you can read you can find your way, Oh, all around the country. We've been doing it for millennia. But if GlobaCorp has its way we shall all soon short-circuit what, over aeons, became hard-wired, countless little electrical antennae attuned to who knows what electro-magnetic global grid, what we haltingly call a sense of direction. It's like that thing we see, sometimes, at the supermarket checkout, the thing which reads the barcodes malfunctions and throws-up some fantastical, impossible price and so estranged is she by technology from simple mental arithmetic that the girl on the till cannot conceive of the fact that this meagre basket of baked beans and tuna and white bread simply cannot amount to over a hundred pounds, if the technology says it is so, then, by God, or onmybabbyslife, it is so. The electronic calculator, the barcode reader, the satnav, living gloriously in the work 'til you drop future, we willingly permit them to burgle our brains, ransacking them of our wits. Hey, babe, are you going to the Feelies tonight?
So this multi-lingual, trans-continental satellite navigation system, in the Robo-Citroen, was, for my purposes, absolutely redundant and probably, like the mobile phone, a nasty harbinger of GlobaCorp Control Systems. No, for me, that manifestation of information technology is as welcome as warm snot on a doorknob. Google, though, is my rod and my staff; my help cometh even from Microsoft Windows, who made Heaven and Earth, I will lift up mine eyes unto Firefox Three; the search engine is my Shepherd, I shall not want, surely Goodness and Mercy shall follow me all the days of my life and I will dwell in cyberspace forever - which, of course, shall we all - as it happened in the beginning, is happening now and shall ever be happening. Fucked without the Internet, I was.
Ducking into netcafes and libraries for half an hour here and there, strangers keyboarding furiously, hemming me in at my shoulders, no access to my Picasa library of freaks and knobheads, blog and email passwords forgotten, it was shit and so I gave up, until I could be at home, always so good to be back home again. Meantime, I read William Burroughs and shopped in one of those larcenous shitholes which rejoice in the name of Antiques Centre - sharp-faced, greedy harridans lying without restraint, Yes, it is Victorian, the fender, it only looks so shiny because we use a special process to clean it up, yes and the brand new screws and the brand new washers, they are part of the special process. It was grim sport, venturing among the unGodly and reminded us of how we cherish our relative isolation here in Scotland, the best part of England.
And talking of which, another reasonwhy there have been a few weeks of relative absenteeism, is the largesse with your money of First Minister Salmond and the Tribesmen. A day after returning home, a big parcel arrived from the Scottish govament, as they insist on calling it. So big it was, that it came on a pallet, a new, energy efficient central heating system; a big, fuck-off, external combi boiler, eight radiators, a new two thousand litre fuel tank and all the knobs and pipes and detectors and alarms and programmers; the lads were a week installing it, carpets up, floorboards up, walls drilled with brightly coloured Makita drills, pipes bent and forced through walls thirty-two inches thick, bookcases emptied, furniture dismantled, hotwater cylinders removed, dust and shit and packaging everywhere, manic plumbers and engineers and sparkses determinedly pressing-on, to the next installation and the next. The cost was getting on for nine grand, my contribution was about eight hundred and, since they offered, I took a loan for it, interest free, repayable over about eight years. It is, of course, this sort of thing, and the scrapping of prescription charges, as much as a righteous loathing of the MacToiletmen, which has seen Salmond, in his own mind, at least, crowned Emperor.
I know that I should have said, Hang about, this is a Barnett Formula freebie too far, no, thank you, Sir, I will stick with my existing CH system, and my Rayburn and my coal fires, I fucking hate radiators anyway, they leak, it's a nasty heat and they occupy walls in a way which restricts the deployment of furniture; actually, I don't mind being a bit cold, even though it's not a good idea to be shivering when one has the former fag and former baconsandwich arteries, grinding and contracting, Mr Death's artificers morbidly modifying my life support piping. And there was a time when I would have said, No, don't want it, let somebody else have it - diffident and painfully self denying, we Zen-Presbyerian-Marxists - but as Mr Doctor John the Night Tripper remarked, If I Don't Do It, Somebody Else Will. I am sure that the UPM, Mr CallHimDave, would go into one - I don't pay my taxes for Mr Ishmael to walk around his house bollock naked in the middle of Winter, no, like most decent people I pay my taxes to fire half-million pound Cruise missiles at wogs in Libya, that's what taxpaying ststesmen like me and Mr Sarkozy the Dwarf and Signor Berlusconi the Pimp pay our taxes for, if we have to pay any that is, which seems most unfair if we do.
Seemed silly, not to take it, when it was offered, and anyway we retained the old, warm-air system, trunked through the house with more hardware than B & Q's got, easy on the sinuses and hard on the damp. Grinning grins all day long of blithe acceptance and understanding at the workmen as they sought vainly to explain one aspect or another of combi-boiler technology and then,when they had gone, squatting in some unfamilar place at some unfamiliar surface, maybe with a telly or a washing machine on in the background made blogging impossible. The young can do this stuff, I see them laptopping away in the most unlikely places, maybe travellers, like mr jgm2 or mr yaic do it perforce, and manage without a mouse, but I can't, I need to sit down in quiet, at my own desk, without hindrance. Just a personal ritual, not just a ritual, the establishment of a productive environment, always been thus. I remember, in the 'eighties, hearing Ruin's children condescendingly explain to me that having Radio One on helped them with their homework, no, really, you have an attitude problem, Ishmael, that's your trouble. The days when we might properly - in everyone's interest - correct or even rebuke the young are long gone, now, washed away in a floodtide of over-protective consumer sentimentality; luvemtobitsmykids, although, of course, such is self-love, mere, worthless, watered-down love.
So there it is, disorientated to the Nth. degree, abroad, adrift, banished from cyberspace, marooned among heathen Godless motherfuckers and then, returning home to the unexpected, unsheduled doings of Chaos. But it's nearly over. The lads just need to return and make the boiler work . The sparks wired the whole thing the wrong way 'round. Other than that, other than it not working at all, it's working fine. I am expecting them anytime from last Friday onwards but of course by now they will be on another job, destroying someone else's hard-won equilibrium, my malinstallation and its remedy erased from their minds.
The people in charge, when the space shuttles went to toast, they knew about it all, the O rings, the missing tiles, there wasn't any need for all that shit to happen; maybe, like my plumber-engineers, they were just too busy being clever, maybe getting on with something else, the next mission, that they completely missed the point of their endeavour. There will be some jargon phrase for this phenomenon, some geekspeak, meant to mollify, exculpate and neutralise, something from the same shitty lexicon as collateral damage It can't be this way everywhere, can it? A monkey wrench up their arses, or a slide rule, that's the remedy.
Back, anyway, to Decency's barricades and as la belle haughty, Lennox, insists, poppily, it's good to be back home again
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s America's middle class battles for its survival on the Wisconsin barricades - against various Koch Oil surrogates and the corporate toadies at Fox News - fans of enlightenment, democracy and justice can take comfort from a significant victory north of the Wisconsin border. Fox News will not be moving into Canada after all! The reason: Canadian regulators 
